If you’re doing anything with Local SEO right now, you’ll want to read about this update to our Keyword Ranking API.
If this is new to you, then you can read more about the capabilities of our powerful SERPs API here. For those who are already familiar with our API, then you will be pleased to hear about a recent addition to its functionality which allows you to programmatically track your rankings within Google’s Local Pack.
You can extract local business listings from Google in two ways:
i) The extraction of Google Local listings data (currently 3 listings) that appear in web search (see image below). This is part of our existing, standard API functionality.
ii) The extraction of many more local listings from Google Local. This is the ‘local’ section of Google that a user is taken to when they click on the ‘View all’ or ‘More’ link under the 3 listings in web search. This is the new Local API service we can now offer.
We already scrape the Local Pack as it appears in the SERPs and this is what it looks like once it had been parsed by the API:
However, when you click through on any of the results in the pack, Google takes you to its Google Local service:
The order of results is important here, as typically the top three results on this page would show up in the Local Pack in the SERPs, so it’s important to monitor your local business’ ranking in this page and now, we can help you do just that with our SERPs API.
All you need to do to make use of this feature, is to simply change the search engine you specify when you make a SERPs API request from ‘google’ to ‘google_local’ and the API will return an API response like this:
You’ll notice that as well as scraping the order of results, we’re also retrieving the following:
All the above details are useful if you’re a local business owner wanting to check how you’re optimised for local SEO or if you’re working for an agency optimising the local SEO visibility for local business clients.
This new Google Places or Google Local service is perfect for anyone who wants to track multiple websites across multiple locations worldwide.
What is unique to our service is our ability to geolocate the query to a specific location, even to a shopfront or your doorstep (give or take a few metres).
Other SEO APIs only allow you to geolocate your queries to a town or postcode/zipcode – but we uniquely allow you to specify an exact decimal latitude and longitude in your API call which we pass on to Google via the web browser. By using a real web browser and behaving like a real user when we request results, we go to greater lengths than any other SEO data provider to get you location accurate SEO results.
Needless to say, this is absolutely essential when tracking results in Google Local. You cannot rely on other keyword ranking APIs that manipulate URLs or use clever SEO parameters to try and trick the search engines into thinking they are in a particular location. Real-users don’t manipulate URLs like this and neither should your provider of critical SEO data.
So, that’s another lot of really useful digital data for you to play with. If you have any feedback at all about this feature, the SERPs API or our SEO platform, we’d love to hear from you and we’d also love to see what you’re building using our data.
Featured image by henry perks on Unsplash
If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.
Up until last year, Wikipedia truly dominated as the cited source in knowledge panels for brands. The truth is much more complex, of course – Google gets its information from multiple sources and gets corroboration / cross checks that information across multiple other sources before including a brand in the Knowledge Graph.
If you want a quick and easy way to find your own IP address on Google Search, then simply go to your local version of Google and ask the question, “What is my IP address”. Google gives you the answer right at the top of the search results.
The quality of the job ad is probably the most significant ranking factor in Google for Jobs. On top of displaying key elements such as a company info, role description, skills and responsibilities, I warmly recommend to add extra layer of information for Google to digest. For example, working hours, salary, benefits, and a more in-depth company information could make the difference between a good and an excellent job ad copy.
MANY of us have seen SEO click through rate (CTR) studies, performed on large data sets, but what can we learn from these, and, more to the point, are they truly representative? Given the ever changing nature of the SERPs – are click-through rate (CTR) studies too crude and limited in their scope to cater for the multi-faceted nature of a typical SERP? And in fact is there even such a thing as a typical SERP anymore?
